History
In Version 11.0 i-net Crystal-Clear was renamed to i-net Clear Reports. At this time it also gained .NET integration as a major feature.
i-net Crystal-Clear was primarily designed to read Crystal Reports templates. It had to be capable of reading the RPT report format and producing a reasonable output. For exporting and saving reasons a new file format had to be created later on, enabling Crystal-Clear to save the API results back and make them editable by a designer. [3]
Crystal Reports is a business intelligence application, marketed to small and medium businesses by SAP SE.
In 2002 the first version of i-net DesignerXML, the report designer, was written using Java Swing. The editing concept is slightly different from some other designers, using a band-oriented report template format, meaning that reports are designed based on rows of data.
The development efforts has changed in more recent years to a full reporting platform approach, rather than the developer-only, framework-based one.
True to its roots, i-net Crystal-Clear still has the ability to read and execute Crystal Reports report templates up until the latest versions of Crystal Reports.
Unlike Crystal Reports, however, the i-net Crystal-Clear report file format has always been an open format. Until version 9.0 it was an XML format. Since version 9, the report file format is in a zip-based format similar to OpenDocument.
The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is a ZIP-compressed XML-based file format for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. It was developed with the aim of providing an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.
Flexibility
Being a Java application, i-net Clear Reports has the ability to run on a variety of platforms and environments. There is virtually no restriction concerning data sources that can be used, as long as there is a JDBC driver available for accessing the data. For non-JDBC data sources, there are how-to's to write simple mini-drivers. With the new .NET API it got even more flexible and allows integration into .NET based applications.
i-net Clear Reports comes as a standalone server as well as a servlet which can be run on any Java EE application server such as Tomcat, Jetty, IIS, or Apache (via PHP).
Apache Tomcat implements several Java EE specifications including Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Java EL, and WebSocket, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment in which Java code can run.
A jetty is a structure that projects from the land out into water. Often, "jetty" refers to a walkway accessing the centre of an enclosed waterbody. The term is derived from the French word jetée, "thrown", and signifies something thrown out.
Internet Information Services is an extensible web server created by Microsoft for use with the Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTP/2, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. It has been an integral part of the Windows NT family since Windows NT 4.0, though it may be absent from some editions, and is not active by default.
Features can be added using the public API, or by adding custom JavaBeans which can be added to reports. User defined functions (UDF) extend the formula features of the embedded formula calculation routines.
In computing based on the Java Platform, JavaBeans are classes that encapsulate many objects into a single object. They are serializable, have a zero-argument constructor, and allow access to properties using getter and setter methods. The name "Bean" was given to encompass this standard, which aims to create reusable software components for Java.
Java Platform, Standard Edition is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for desktop and server environments. Java SE was formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE).
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JavaServer Faces (JSF) is a Java specification for building component-based user interfaces for web applications and was formalized as a standard through the Java Community Process being part of the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition. It is also a MVC web framework that simplifies construction of user interfaces (UI) for server-based applications by using reusable UI components in a page.
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Oracle Reports is a tool for developing reports against data stored in an Oracle database. Oracle Reports consists of Oracle Reports Developer and Oracle Application Server Reports Services.
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A JDBC driver is a software component enabling a Java application to interact with a database. JDBC drivers are analogous to ODBC drivers, ADO.NET data providers, and OLE DB providers.
ExtenXLS is a Java Excel Reporting Toolkit developed by Extentech. It is a Reporting API that allows for the reading in, modifying and creation of spreadsheet-based reports from Java applications.
The Java Persistence API (JPA), in 2019 renamed to Jakarta Persistence, is a Java application programming interface specification that describes the management of relational data in applications using Java Platform, Standard Edition and Java Platform, Enterprise Edition/Jakarta EE.
MessagePlus/Open is a communication platform for medium to large organizations designed specifically to handle high volumes of traffic within a high-availability environment. Currently supported communication channels include fax, fax over IP, e-mail and SMS, together withvarious options for integration with business applications. The product has been developed by INTERCOPE GmbH, Germany and is sold by both Intercope and IBM. It was previously known as FaxPlus/Open.
Oracle XML Publisher (XMLP) is Oracle Corporation's latest reporting technology. It was originally developed to solve the reporting problems faced by Oracle Applications. Osama Elkady from the Applications Technology Group and Tim Dexter from the Financials Group were the main drivers for the product. It was first released with Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 in 2003. Since then it has been integrated into most of Oracle Products including JD Edwards EnterpriseOne application 8.12 and PeopleSoft Enterprise 9, and as a standalone version, XML Publisher Enterprise with no dependency on Oracle Applications. When XML Publisher became part of the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Suite it was re-branded as Oracle BI Publisher.
The SQuirreL SQL Client is a database administration tool. It uses JDBC to allow users to explore and interact with databases via a JDBC driver. It provides an editor that offers code completion and syntax highlighting for standard SQL. It also provides a plugin architecture that allows plugin writers to modify much of the application's behavior to provide database-specific functionality or features that are database-independent. As this desktop application is written entirely in Java with Swing UI components, it should run on any platform that has a JVM.
ActiveReports is a .NET reporting tool used by developers of WinForms, ASP.NET, and HTML5 applications. It was originally developed by Data Dynamics, which was then acquired by GrapeCity. ActiveReports is a set of components and tools that facilitates the production of reports to display data in documents and web-based formats. It is written in managed C# code and allows Visual Studio programmers to leverage their knowledge of C# or Visual Basic.NET when programming with ActiveReports.
Java view technologies and frameworks are web-based software libraries that provide the user interface, or "view-layer", of Java web applications. Such application frameworks are used for defining web pages and handling the HTTP requests (clicks) generated by those web pages. As a sub-category of web frameworks, view-layer frameworks often overlap to varying degrees with web frameworks that provide other functionality for Java web applications.
OpenSearchServer is an open-source application server allowing development of index-based applications such as search engines. Available since April 2009 on SourceForge for download, OpenSearchServer was developed under the GPL v3 license and offers a series of full text lexical analyzers. It can be installed on different platforms.
Sheetster is a GPL open-source Web Spreadsheet and a Java Application Server created by Extentech Inc. The product was created for the enterprise and small and medium-sized businesses as an Open Source alternative to closed document management systems.
Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is an application programming interface (API) for the programming language Java, which defines how a client may access a database. It is a Java-based data access technology used for Java database connectivity. It is part of the Java Standard Edition platform, from Oracle Corporation. It provides methods to query and update data in a database, and is oriented towards relational databases. A JDBC-to-ODBC bridge enables connections to any ODBC-accessible data source in the Java virtual machine (JVM) host environment.
Canigó is the name chosen for the Java EE framework of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
Intrexx is a cross-platform integrated development environment for the creation and operation of web-based applications, enterprise portals and intranet portals. A portal is created according to the drag and drop principle, without the need for programming. Furthermore, Intrexx can create mobile applications for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and the like with just a few mouse clicks.
